Smoking, to many people, is a highly desirable personal habit or practice despite the mounting body of evidence that the smoking of tobacco in cigarette form in particular has many undesirable and potentially hazardous effects on the smoker.
Programs have been instituted in an attempt to produce less hazardous cigarettes by the treatment of tobacco and tobacco products to remove as many undesirable components and constituents therefrom as possible without destroying the flavor of the ultimate smokable product.
For example, there appear to be certain key characteristics which consumers consider a requisite for acceptability of cigarette products. For example, if the cigarette does not have a fragrance which is generally tobacco-like or at least similar to the fragrance of burning tobacco, then the product is considered unacceptable. Also the character of the smoke must be other than that of a burning paper and more like wood smoke or the like and produce both moistness and fullness in the mouth of the consumer smoking the final product.
In addition to the foregoing, other efforts have been made to develop tobacco substitutes including, for example, the use of chemically treated coffee bean hulls and the like such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,796,222 of Edward J. Deszyck entitled "Method of Making a Smoking Product From Coffee Bean Hulls" issued Mar. 12, 1974. This patent discloses a number of relatively complex chemical treatments of coffee bean hulls in order to cause specific chemical reactions and extractions of the components of the coffee hulls to produce a smokable coffee product which is usable either alone or as disclosed in the patent, preferably in a mixture with natural tobacco.
However, in the patent just identified, as well as in other smoking products, expensive chemical reagents such as humectants are all considered to be a required component of the ultimate product and accordingly, greatly increase the cost of the product.